Science Night, Round 1

I forgot to mention one of the PET scan requirements: No exercise for 48 hours prior to the scan. Granted, there are probably people (the XS, for example) in the world for whom this would really be a problem, but for me that's a lot like instructing me not to jump off a building for 48 hours. Yeah, not really much of a constraint. Except...

Except that exercise is actually a useful way to bring down your blood sugar levels. Worst case scenario, I could just get up really early in front of my scan and, if my blood sugar was high, go out and run around the block until either my sugar came down or my feet fell off. 

So the no exercise rule cuts off another avenue for pre-scan blood sugar control.

So that's the bad news. The good news is that my scan did, in fact, get moved from 1:00 pm to 7:30 am -- still next Wednesday -- so now I only have to manage to land my blood sugar at the right level when I wake up, not keep it there for an additional six hours beyond that. 

And that leads to the science. I now have tonight, tomorrow night, Sunday night, and Monday night to figure out how to eat everything I'm going to eat and take whatever insulin I'm going to take before 7:30 pm, and then wake up at, say, 6:00 in the morning, with my blood sugar somewhere between 80 and 150. 

Oh, and this weekend is my birthday, so Sunday night is out because I'm having dinner with friends and there's going to be cake from the Macrina Bakery and I have always said that quality of life trumps quantity of life and believe me when I say that the quality of life is vastly increased by the presence of cake from Macrina. Thus, Sunday's more or less out as a trial run for Tuesday's pre-scan prep, and so I've got three nights to figure out how to be ready for my scan Wednesday morning.

So here's the results from tonight's first round...

Blood sugar at 7:00 pm: 270 (which is really high, but that's a long story)
Insulin taken: 27 units lantus, 25 units humalog
Food: two slices of leftover pizza, one shot of espresso (decaf)
Blood sugar at 8:30 pm: 65 -- EXPERIMENT FAILED
Blood sugar at midnight: 53 -- FAIL
Blood sugar at 9:00 am: 219 -- MAJOR FAIL

Commentary and experiences: 
Starting at 270 was not an advantage. Bringing your blood sugar down from an unusual high is always a challenge, and tonight I overshot it. Problem with overshooting it is that you can't really leave it that way, lest you wind up in a coma or worse, so I had to eat something. Eating less than 12 hours before the scan is against the rules, so if my scan were tomorrow it would be cancelled. Well, maybe. I'll try not to eat anything else tonight, and will check my blood sugar first thing in the morning. If the result is in the 80-150 range, I'll consider this one close enough. Eleven hours strikes me as close enough to twelve that if my scan were tomorrow and my blood sugar was at the right level, I'd lie and say I was on a twelve hour fast. 

I knew this was going to be hard, but yikes!

Watch for an update tomorrow with the overnight results. 

Overnight update: 
Yup, this attempt was a complete failure. At midnight my blood sugar was still low so I had to eat again (failure #2), and when I woke up my blood sugar had jumped to 219 (failure #3). Since it's Saturday, I wasn't awake at 7:00, so it's possible it rose from less than 150 during the morning, but I doubt it. I think the major take away from this round was to figure out how to start the evening with blood sugar at more normal levels. Of course, I'm always supposed to have my blood sugar at more normal levels and that clearly hasn't worked so far.